Commentary By

Walter E. Williams is a columnist for The Daily Signal and a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Frederic Bastiat, a French economist and member of the French National Assembly, lived from 1801 to 1850. He had great admiration for our country, except for our two faults—slavery and tariffs.

He said: “Look at the United States. There is no
country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the
protection of every person’s liberty and property.”

If Bastiat were alive today, he would not have that same
level of admiration. The U.S. has become what he fought against for most of his
short life.

Bastiat observed that “when plunder becomes a way of
life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for
themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies
it.”

You might ask, “What did Bastiat mean by ‘plunder’?”

Plunder is when someone forcibly takes the property of
another. That’s private plunder. What he truly railed against was legalized
plunder, and he told us how to identify it.

He said: “See if the law takes from some persons what
belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See
if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the
citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

That could describe today’s American laws. We enthusiastically demand that the Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another American.

You say: “Williams, that’s insulting. It’s no less than
saying that we Americans support a form of slavery!”

What then should we call it when two-thirds to three-quarters
of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget can be described as Congress taking the
property of one American and giving it to another to whom it does not belong?

Where do you think Congress gets the billions upon billions
of dollars for business and farmer handouts?

What about the billions handed out for Medicare, Medicaid,
food stamps, housing allowances, and thousands of other handouts?

There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy giving Congress the money, and members of Congress are not spending their own money. The only way Congress can give one American $1 is to first take it from another American.

What if I privately took the property of one American to
give to another American to help him out? I’m guessing and hoping you’d call it
theft and seek to jail me. When Congress does the same thing, it’s still theft.
The only difference is that it’s legalized theft.

However, legality alone does not establish morality. Slavery
was legal; was it moral? Nazi, Stalinist, and Maoist purges were legal, but
were they moral?

Some argue that Congress gets its authority to bypass its
enumerated powers from the general welfare clause. There are a host of proofs
that the Framers had no such intention.

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote, “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our tenet ever was … that
Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were
restrained to those specifically enumerated.”

Rep. William Drayton of South Carolina asked in 1828,
“If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can
appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into
execution whatever can be effected by money?”

What about our nation’s future?

Alexis de Tocqueville is said to have predicted, “The
American republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can
bribe the public with the public’s money.”

We long ago began ignoring Bastiat’s warning when the federal government was just a tiny fraction of gross domestic product—3 percent, as opposed to today’s 20 percent: “If you don’t take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system.”

Moral Americans are increasingly confronted with Bastiat’s
dilemma: “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the
cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for
the law.”

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